For network traffic monitoring, a user may need to identify certain targets. A target in this context is a network component for which the network monitoring is performed. For example, if a user wants to monitor network traffic going to a certain target, then the user may identify such target in the monitoring session. The task performed by the user to identify every target that needs to be monitored may become tedious, especially when there is a very large number of potential targets. Also, such a task may need to be repeated every time a new rule or a new map is created. In addition, if new targets of interest appear in the monitoring domain, they may need to be manually identified by the user, so that the user can associate the new targets with the map, before these new targets can be monitored.